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I'm shocked at the advert on the TV at the moment, I think it is for Pepsi (must be an effective commercial).
Anyhow, the camera is at the bottom of a swimming pool pointing up, and a dog jumps in. It's "little chap" is covered by a black rectangle. The shot is so breif I personally I wouldn't have noticed its "doghood" if they hadn't covered it.

“Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities - that's training or instruction - but is rather making visible what is hidden as a seed”“One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated”

“Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities - that's training or instruction - but is rather making visible what is hidden as a seed”“One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated”

With the caveat that I've never gone beyond a bit of puttering, I've got one of those and have been mostly happy with it.

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

my main computer at home is a godbox class desktop with a 3 monitor 4960x1600 config. Laptops never go beyond the puttering stage unless I'm on the road. I've got two long weekends planned over the next month and a half that should give the x2 a solid workout.

My main objective is figuring out if all the misc desktop enhancements are worth the rainbow colored full screen start menu for my new desktop built later this year. (Notionally: Haswell, 1TB SSD, GTX680, 16(32?) GB ram.)

Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius

Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt

I was a desktop guy until a week ago; built my last desktop from a dual Xeon shell, plugged into 5.1 and a 40 inch telly, with parts from the spares draw and wireless keyboard and mouse.
It's a lovely multimedia and programming and world domination centre, but the used Elitebook I picked up for a song is definitely not just for puttering. It renders mp4 twice as fast as the four xeon cores, and is a serious piece of kit.
Tablets? Definitely. Puttering. Mine is used for Skype where it really shines.
Hybrid tablets like the ones you guys are discussing? Could be pretty handy, not just puttering.

We're using the ACER W700 series Windows 8 Tablet to do all our development with. Hardware is rock-solid, touchscreen, external VGA capability, etc... and most of all it has a screen resolution of 1920x1080 (1080p) to meet your graphic needs. Hope this helps...

I use Acer w700 for all my development but I've got my eye on the new Lenovo Thinkpad Helix. 256 GB SSD, 8 GB ram, core i7 CPU, detachable screen where you can turn it to the other side as well for presentation. Looks really cool. It's expensive though.

I have A Lenovo Yoga, its the one where the keyboard can flip around back and it becomes a tablet. I like it a lot, but I don't use it in tablet mode much. You can also flip it around into a "tent" mode so it's a self-standing touchscreen tablet. While that might be useful in a trade show environment, a tablet and stand is probably cheaper. Its got an SSD, so it boots from power-off in ~10 seconds, shuts back down in about 15 seconds, neither of which probably matters in a trade show environment. However, it will absolutely need AC power to run all day (as will any other tablet with an Intel processor that runs Win8), a real tablet with an ARM that runs WinRT might not.

I've also been doing a bit of C# dev on it recently a la VS 2010 express. It works for that as well as any other laptop.

The yogas were a hot product back around Christmas time, so the device itself might attract some attention. Almost certainly more than a tablet or laptop. You'd have to display it in tent configuration so people noticed it though.

We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.

I recently bought a Toshiba U925t, it's Nice as a tablet and as a laptop, althought I recommend you to buy a Mouse with it because the touchpad stinks; if you look to use an stylus see the Vaio Dúo 11, it's wacom compatible; and in general look for at least 256Gb hard disks.

I know it's not great but it works well for me mostly, it's just the slowing down and grinding if I try and run too much stuff. My question to the hive mind: if I upgrade the memory to 4GB will it be worth it to keep the box going another six months or so? I can [just] afford a new box, but I would rather wait and get a bigger F/O lappie when [or if] I start working again.

Aside from the obvious question - Why on earth would you put 4gig of memory into a machine that can only access 75% of it? (WinXp x86 has a limit of 3.2 gig. Need a 64bit o/s to access more) I see no reason not to put at least another gig into it. If the MB will support it, I'd consider putting in a 2gig and a 1gig stick - it most likely has 2 x 512MB in it.

Also, unless you consider the iPhone/iPad family of products to be good value for money, get something more reasonably priced for the specs. Toshiba never really was known for having a good dollars to features ratio.

Also, if it has 2x HDD bay, I'd consider throwing a 64gig SDD into it. That will vastly improve paging performance. It's quite possible that it will cost less than 3gb of ram too. (assuming as prevuiously mentioned, that it currently has 2 x 512mb sticks in it.)

CPUid will also tell you a bunch of info about the board and the memory - from capacity/speed right down to voltage, wait-states and even month/year of manufacture.

You can use up to 3GB per process if you change the /3GB setting[^] in the startup. But if you're having a 768MB graphic card you're having almost nothing left for the system and your computer will probably not run properly.
So you can fiddle with the /USERVA if you want to experiment.

That's very similar to the machine that I just partially replaced (I bought a new one but I still use the old one a lot out of habit). If it's like mine I would guess that it is probably physically quite worn (keyboard going soggy, trackpad wearing, fan bearing getting noisy, dust clogging up internal vents etc) and that is as much a reason to replace as the technology. If you're not trying to run anything new or intensive then there's no reason why the technology should be slowing you down.

Remember that 32 bit XP will only reference 3GB of memory so it may not be worth buying 4; buy 2 and upgrade it to 2.5GB. I did that to mine so it would run Starcraft II (albeit only just).